States are more like people than they are like anything else: they exist by purpose, reason, suffering, and joy. And peace between states is also like peace between people. It involves the willing renunciation of purpose, in the mutual desire not to do, but to be.
Roger ScrutonStyles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.
Roger ScrutonBeauty is assailed from two directions - by the cult of ugliness in the arts, and by the cult of utility in everyday life.
Roger ScrutonModernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification
Roger ScrutonThe welfare state that is built upon this conception seems to prove precisely away from the conservative conception of authoritative and personal government, towards a labyrinthine privilege sodden structure of anonymous power, structuring a citizenship that is increasingly reluctant to answer for itself, increasingly parasitic on the dispensations of a bureaucracy towards which it can feel no gratitude.
Roger Scruton